There’s no question that business blogging can drive traffic, leads, and sales.

But did you know that business blogging can also dramatically simplify all your other online marketing efforts, and save you a surprising amount of of time and money?

Online marketing is complicated

Let’s face it. For the average small-mid sized company, marketing today has become almost impossibly complicated.

It’s difficult enough having to create amazing content, but then there’s getting it to rank in search engines, sending it out by email, promoting it on social media like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. And don’t forget Instagram and Pinterest!

How’s any small business owner supposed to manage all this?

What if there was a way you could simply focus on one marketing channel, and in doing so, it could magically cover all your other channels?

The good news is, there is! It’s called the “blog-centered” online marketing strategy.

What is it?

How’s that possible?

Because great blog content can practically automatically power all the other crucial components of a successful online marketing strategy!

When done right, your blog can power your:

Content marketing

Search engine optimization

Email marketing

Social media marketing

And this in turn can save you lots of time and money.

Your Blog Can Power Your Content Marketing

This one’s pretty obvious. Content marketing is all about creating great content that gets found, clicked, read, and shared with others.

Your blog is one of many types of content you could be creating. So obviously, blogging can power your content marketing.

But why focus only on your blog?

Why not focus on white papers, ebooks, or video?

Don’t get us wrong. These are all excellent forms of content that can drive equally excellent results.

However, for the purposes of this post, we’re speaking to the average small or mid sized company that has limited marketing resources and budget. If that describes you, you’re probably looking to invest your precious resources into only the simplest, yet most effective channels.

That’s where your blog comes in.

Compared to other forms of content, blog posts are just plain simpler to produce. Since they tend to be shorter in length, they’re easier to plan, produce, edit, and publish.

But don’t confuse the simplicity of blogging to mean there’s no work involved.

In order for the blog-centered strategy to be successful, you still have to spend time before, during, and after production. You’ll still need to research and find the right keyword to target.

You’ll still need to develop clear writer instructions. You’ll still need to review the first draft, revise, sleep on it, revise some more… until you’re truly happy with each piece.

Every sentence you write should make them want to read the next sentence you write. The headline only exists to get the first sentence read. The first sentence only exists to get the second sentence read. And so on… It’s that simple. And it’s that difficult.

So while simple, a blog focused strategy will still require careful planning, great writing, and a thorough review and editing process.

Attract social “share signals” that inform search engines of a post’s popularity

Obviously, we don’t have enough time time in this post to cover all the ins and outs of SEO, so we’ll leave you with 3 key tips:

Always start with keyword research. This is the simplest way to make sure you’re writing about stuff your readers actually care about, AND increase your chances of getting ranked high in the search engines.Build a list of all the keywords you want to rank for, focusing on the long-tail phrases. Then pull from this list whenever it’s time to come up with topics and titles to write about for your blog.

Optimize, but don’t go crazy. It’s ok, and actually important, to include your keyword a few times on the page in key places, like the title, H1’s, and meta description. But don’t go overboard or you could get penalized. Above all, write for humans, no search engines.

Use SEO tools like SEOmoz and SEMrush to perform an initial SEO audit of your site, discover new optimization ideas, compare yourself with others in your industry, and analyze important metrics.

Your Blog Can Power Your Email Marketing

People often come to us asking for help creating email content. The first thing we ask them is, do you blog?

If they answer yes, our advice is simple, and surprising:

There’s no need to create separate email content!

That’s because, we explain, it already exists, and all you need to do is re-package it.

One of the best things about a blog-centered marketing strategy is that it not only eliminates the need to create separate newsletter content, but that it’s actually more effective and will get better results!

Yes, this is one of those rare times in business where doing less actually produces better results!

The easiest way to accomplish this is by simply finding the best performing blog posts each month, and including a few of them in a monthly newsletter. The subject line could be your best performing blog. Then, the body can include a few more headlines, along with their first few lines of test, with a “read more” link at the end that leads people back to your site.

Yes, it actually is that simple.

Your Blog Can Power Your Social Media Marketing

If you know what you’re doing, social media can deliver real, measurable results in sales, leads, and branding.

But for many small and mid sized businesses, social media can be a confusing mess and real time suck. Worst of all, all their time and resources often result in little in the way of real results.

Once again, your blog to the rescue!

Just like with email marketing, businesses also often make the mistake of thinking they need to come up with new social media posts every day. In reality, the simplest and most effective posts are those that tell people about your latest blog post!

So all you need to do is focus on posting awesome blogs. Then after each post is published, just go to your various social media channels and simply tell everyone about it. It’s amazing how a simple “Come check out our latest blog post” can perform - assuming you have a creative and engaging title that draws people in and makes them want to read it.

Of course, large companies have all sorts of complex, sophisticated social media campaigns. But they have the resources to do that. For the rest of us, if we can save 90% of the work, and achieve 80% of the same results, that’s good enough!

The Bottom Line

Don’t stress yourself by trying to imitate the complicated and expensive online marketing strategies used by the mega corporations.

You don’t need to work HARDER.

You need to work SMARTER.

… and the smartest thing you can do for your business is implement a blog-centered marketing strategy that puts your blog first, and lets everything else fall right into place.